Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde

Even before Jean Luc Godard and other members of the French New Wave championed Hollywood B movies, aesthetes and cineasts relished the raw emotions of genre films This contradiction has been particularly true of horror cinema, in which the same images and themes found in exploitation and splatter movies are also found in avant garde and experimental films, blurring boundEven before Jean Luc Godard and other members of the French New Wave championed Hollywood B movies, aesthetes and cineasts relished the raw emotions of genre films This contradiction has been particularly true of horror cinema, in which the same images and themes found in exploitation and splatter movies are also found in avant garde and experimental films, blurring boundaries of taste and calling into question traditional distinctions between high and low culture.In Cutting Edge, Joan Hawkins offers an original and provocative discussion of taste, trash aesthetics, and avant garde culture of the 1960s and 1970s to reveal horror s subversiveness as a genre In her treatment of what she terms art horror films, Hawkins examines home viewing, video collection catalogs, and fanzines for insights into what draws audiences to transgressive films Cutting Edged provides the first extended political critique of Yoko Ono s rarely seen Rape and shows how a film such as Franju s Eyes without a Face can work simultaneously as an art, political, and splatter film The rediscovery of Tod Browning s Freaks as an art film, the eurotrash cinema of Jess Franco, camp cults like the one around Maria Montez, and the cross over reception of Andy Warhol s Frankenstein are all studied for what they reveal about cultural hierarchies.Looking at the low aspects of high culture and the high aspects of low culture, Hawkins scrutinizes the privilege habitually accorded high art a tendency, she argues, that lets highbrow culture off the hook and removes it from the kinds of ethical and critical social discussions that have plagued horror and porn Full of unexpected insights, Cutting Edge calls fora rethinking of high low distinctions and a reassigning of labels at the video store.

Cutting Edge Art Horror and the Horrific Avant garde Even before Jean Luc Godard and other members of the French New Wave championed Hollywood B movies aesthetes and cineasts relished the raw emotions of genre films This contradiction has been particul

1 thought on “Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde”

I realllly wanted her to touch more on the subversive cultural/sociological aspects and also how body genres use (& often abuse) women's bodies (any more than any other form of cinema though? or is this just a classist target/scapegoat criticism?) when she seemed to begin to touch upon it, but since that wasn't the thesis of the book I suppose it makes sense she never went full flung into that conversation which is worth another book alone (in fact there's probably another book on that out t [...]